In January, Netflix raised prices, again, on the heels of its biggest ever subscriber jump, which seems backwards to me. You can pay for Hulu, sure, but you will still get ads even when you pay specifically to not see ads.
The incursion of longer ad breaks; ballooning subscription costs; and the splintering of entertainment and intellectual property into a constellation of streaming platforms — it doesn’t really matter which ones we’re talking about because they’re all terrible. The actual business of delivering movies and television — art forms that have been producing genuine works of art for years now — is a gigantic hole in the ground where the Sesame Street characters sit holding a giant For Sale sign.
For what subscribers give large streamers their money is increasingly unclear. It does not go to artists — Spotify is famous for paying musicians fractions of a penny, and Hollywood has only recently emerged from actor and writer strikes rebelling against the overwhelming force that Netflix and other streamers wield.
(If you are a user of Amazon, Apple, or YouTube for music, those streamers pay more than two fractions of a penny to musicians.)
There’s an alternative that I hope you already know about: the library. Even for streaming the library can offer you free streaming services, free, it’s free, no charge to you, it’s free, streaming services you can probably access through your TV right now.
Here in Minneapolis, I get access to a streaming service called Kanopy through my local library system. It does not have Severance or The White Lotus, but it does have all 30 seasons of Midsomer Murders and more actual good movies than I could possibly watch in a lifetime. I have watched recent Oscar bait like Past Lives there, recent beloveds like Oldboy, and classics like The Third Man just in the last few weeks.
It genuinely sucks that Kanopy (and its competitor Hoopla) don’t have the newest produced shows and movies. Luckily, instead, you can watch something interesting, something really truly good. Oldboy, for instance, is a movie that not only rocks on its own merits but whose blood-and-guts ending reminded me of art’s ability to grab its audience by the shoulders and shake as hard as possible. It was ten thousand times the experience of watching anything on Netflix, where content slowly washes over you like a numbing gel.
To learn more about my love affair with Kanopy, and with not paying out-of-pocket for media in general, I talked with the two big local library systems in the Twin Cities, Hennepin County (Minneapolis) and Ramsey County (St. Paul).
J.R. Genett is the deputy director of support services at the Hennepin County Library. She oversees the team that selects the books, CDs, databases, e-audio, and other media.
To Gennett, a library is fundamentally a place for the community to simply get information, and streaming content is just another way for people to receive information. “So it was natural to branch out into streaming,” she said.